As Coca-Cola Bottling Co. Consolidated has enjoyed major success with the Fridge Pack for cans, it’s also made some modifications to tweak a little more output from one of the Charlotte canning lines.
When the company completed its second can line to produce the 2x6 Fridge Packs, it found it could boost production by replacing the conveyor between the multipacker and the palletizer.
The company called T-Tek Material Handling (Montgomery, AL), a vendor it had worked with on the first Fridge Pack production line. In the end, T-Tek recommended a wider matte-top conveyor that could carry the multipack six-cans-wide, rather than two-cans-wide as it did in the first line.
“Most beverage companies don’t have conveyors that can handle multipacks that are six-cans-wide,” says T-Tek’s Mike Traff. “In this case, it was a relatively short run to the palletizer, and the company bought a wide conveyor that would handle this wide package.” Alliance Industrial (Lynchburg, VA) supplies the conveyor.
With the wide conveyor, the new system now can produce Fridge Packs at 125 packs/min, up from about 110/min for the first line where the packs are still conveyed two-cans-wide, according to Dave Brown, Coke Consolidated’s manager of engineering.
See the story that goes with this sidebar: Fridge Pack rolls out for Dasani
